


The First Rule

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 02:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3711373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Lalli’s scouting mission goes horribly wrong, help arrives from an unexpected source.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Reynir, you okay?” Tuuri asked, crouching down next to the young man who was cowering by one of the bunks.

“Huh? Oh… yeah… I think so…” Reynir murmured, his expression hollow.

“Look, I know Sigrun’s a bit mad at you now but she’ll calm down eventually. Mikkel said that what happened wasn’t even your fault.”

“I guess…” Reynir didn’t sound convinced.

Across the crew compartment from the two of them Sigrun was dividing her time between yelling into the radio and yelling at everyone else. Mikkel stood his ground against her like a mountain weathering a squall, speaking in calm and measured tones that had all the effect of trying to blow out a forest fire. Emil hung around the fringes of this verbal battleground like an incompetent referee, trying to placate them both with little success.

“…nearly got us both killed!” Sigrun was ranting. “I am not about to let this expedition get compromised by some slack-jawed incompetent _yokel_! He goes, right now!”

“Sigrun, it was your decision to take him hunting in the first place…”

“I thought he would be able to cope! I thought a simple hunt for food less than half a kilometre out and in the company of two experienced soldiers wouldn’t be too taxing for him! I won’t make that mistake again!”

“Sigrun, it was kind of my fault-”

“We both know the ship will be at least a month-”

“Both of you _shut up_. I want him gone, and I want him gone now…”

Sigrun glared across at Reynir over Mikkel’s shoulder. If looks could kill, Reynir would have been little more than a heat-shadow on the wall and maybe a pair of smoking boots. He cringed and curled up, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his chin on them. He looked like he was about to cry.

Tuuri moved to block his view of Sigrun as the shouting match continued behind her. As she did so, she noticed a crumpled piece of paper lying discarded on the floor next to him. Reynir had sketched out some strange design on the back of their poster about the maahinen.

“Hey, what’s this?” she asked, reaching across him and picking it up. She squinted at the odd symbol that the Icelander had drawn out on the paper, the ink still wet and smudging slightly.

“Oh… heh, that…” Reynir sounded faintly embarrassed. “Just one of my doodles. Used to do them all the time as a kid. Drove my parents up the wall, putting them all over my room back home. I don’t even know why I do them, half the time I just sort of come to and there they are. Pretty silly, right?” He grinned awkwardly.

Tuuri glanced back down at what he had drawn. “I don’t know… looks kind of cool to me.” She smiled back at him.

From up above them came a very quiet murmur. They both glanced up to see Lalli peering down at them from the top bunk with an expression of intense suspicion. Tuuri glared back at him – “ _Stop staring!”_ – but he ignored her completely. He wasn’t looking at them, she realised, but at the symbol Reynir had doodled on the paper. “What, this?” she asked. “Reynir drew it. Have a look, if you want.” She reached up and offered the poster to Lalli, who snatched it up and retreated back out of sight without a word.

“Your cousin doesn’t like me, does he?” Reynir muttered quietly as she sat back down. “What did I _do_?”

Tuuri scowled. “I don’t think you did anything. Lalli’s just… well, he can be a bit twitchy around new people. You get used to it.” She decided to change the subject. “So anyway, this troll you three found out there… what did it look like?”

Up above them, laid out on his bunk, Lalli was trying desperately to block out all the noise the others were making. It had been two days since the stranger had arrived in the boxes from that boat and all anyone had done since then was shout. Lalli didn’t know if he could handle it much longer. He was half tempted to just get up and run out into the silent world, slam the door on all this noise and take his chances. But he stayed, because he had to keep an eye on this stranger. He had seen him before, that one time in the dreamworld. And when Lalli saw things in dreams they had a nasty habit of causing all sorts of trouble in the real world later down the line. So he covered his ears as best he could and looked again at the symbol Tuuri had passed up to him.

There was something _wrong_ about it. On the face of it, the symbol was just a random scribble drawn by someone passing the time. It looked a bit like a capital ‘J’ but with lines and curves branching off of it and connecting to one another seemingly at random, as if it had caught some calligraphic rash disease. But… Lalli didn’t know how to describe it. It was as if every time he shifted his gaze it changed subtly. Lines changed, dots expanded into circles, the whole thing shifted its orientation. It felt like magic of some kind, but of a form he didn’t recognise and for a purpose he couldn’t fathom. He made a snap decision and crumpled up the paper into his pocket. He would have to show this to Onni if he could reach him, the sooner the better.

Across the crew compartment, the shouting was getting louder. Lalli groaned to himself, shook his head slightly and hopped nimbly down onto the floor. Maybe it was time for another scouting mission. Anything to get away from this.


	2. Chapter 2

It was not a good night for scouting, not at all. In the heavens the moon’s face was obscured by dense, billowing clouds and the stars shone weakly through what gaps they could find. The air felt thick and heavy, too warm for late autumn. It was like someone had pulled a hood over the world, blinding it and cutting off its air. No breeze rustled the trees, no animals called into the darkness. The whole world was silent.

Lalli was in his element.

He sprinted through the night like a ghost, passing like a whisper between ruined tanks and derelict dugouts. Soft grass gave way to hard asphalt beneath his feet and he adjusted his pace seamlessly, a lifetime of scouting preparing him for the sudden transition from new world soil to old world wreckage. In his head he saw the map Tuuri had showed him before he left as clear as if he still held it in his hand: a single road running straight from the coast into the heart of the old city like an arrow piercing its heart, six lanes of tarmac charging across the landscape. It was this road he was travelling now, dodging between the occasional rusted car and broken down truck that still contained the remains of their luckless drivers.

Shadows as black as pitch yielded up their secrets to his electric-blue gaze as he sprinted by. His eyes flicked from feature to feature of the blasted and desolate landscape, adding to the map in his head. Over there, an overpass that had once soared arrogantly over the road below now lay sagging and broken. To one side, an embankment littered with overgrown shrubs and stunted trees. And now came buildings, starting to crowd around him like eager children as he left the outskirts and entered the suburbs. To someone who had been raised on a tiny island in Saimaa and reached adulthood in the low-rise confines of Keuruu, even the smallest of these was still something of a marvel. They lined the road that he ran, some small and squat and covered in broken ductwork and piping, some tall and leaning drunkenly on their neighbours like tired friends. Long-ruined windows gazed out across the night, shattered eye sockets in these tombstones of the old world.

And from within, things with eyes and teeth and appetites peered out across a world that was now theirs. Lalli kept running. He was not welcome in this city.

He followed the road as it split and forked, running against the current of this great asphalt river up towards its source. It corkscrewed up into the sky on stilts and burrowed into tunnels beneath the earth like an animal trying to shake his pursuit, but he kept on its trail. Rusted road signs suspended from sagging gantries high above tried to offer him direction in their meaningless languages, but he ignored them. The buildings around him morphed from angular and industrial to softer, smaller designs. He passed along old high streets and skirted the ruins of shopping centres. He detoured round piles of rubble that had once been mighty skyscrapers and piles of meat that had once been… something else. Everything he saw, he catalogued. The map in his head became richer with every step he took and every sight he saw, sprouting annotations and crossings-out and shortcuts. Above him the clouds roiled and twisted, holding back the moon’s light like floodgates as the night ran its course.

Eventually the asphalt ended and cobblestones took its place. He had arrived in a large square, surrounded on three sides by sheer brick walls that were slowly being overwhelmed by ivy and creepers. A ruined fountain sat in the middle of the square and Lalli trotted over to it, hunkering down next to an eroded stone lion. He checked around him. Here he was almost invisible from the road and was protected by the walls – it was the perfect place to stop and catch his breath.

He let ten minutes go by, half-listening for anything creeping up on him but mostly wondering what he was going to do about the braided stranger, before getting back to his feet and preparing to move on. That was the first rule of scouting – never be in the same place for long. Oh sure, there was the other first rule, the one everyone would trot out when asked. But that was only for when you got caught, and a good scout didn’t.

He was just stepping out from behind the rubble of the fountain when-

_(HJÆLP MIG)  
_

The words exploded in his mind like a powder charge. He collapsed to his knees, stunned. _A giant_ , he thought as panic rose in his chest. It must be a giant if he could hear them that loudly. _Where is it_ -

_(GUD HJÆLPE MIG)  
_

Anguish, pain, terror, madness, _hunger_ slithered around inside his head. Lalli gasped and tried to push them away, tried to remember these weren’t his thoughts, weren’t his words. The screams of the dead, trapped in their prisons of bone and flesh, hammered at his mind.

_(HVORFOR OS)  
_

For the briefest second he saw the little plaza through alien eyes, lurking from the shadows that bordered it. He felt his attention ( _no not his something else’s_ ) fixate on the structure in the middle. Was there something in there? Some tasty morsel worth investigating? He ( _it_ ) couldn’t wait to find out.

_(LØBE VÆK)  
_

Calm down, deep breaths, you are not them, you will _not_ end up like them, now _get out of here_ -

_(SULTEN)_

Too late.

It was already halfway across the square, flowing out of a side street like a river. A giant to be sure, no troll ever grew to that size. Legs thrashed and mouths lolled as it barrelled across the cobbles towards him. Heads mounted on spines longer than trees swivelled and swooped above it, scanning the plaza like searchlights for any sign of the prey it had gotten a whiff of. Claws of bone and nail flexed in anticipation of the next meal.

With a great effort Lalli drew up his mental drawbridges and the screams in his head stopped like he had turned a radio off. But the giant was almost on top of him now. There was no sense trying to make a break for it with the thing this close but he might just be able to hide. He scrambled back behind the rubble, trying to make himself as small as possible. He could hear the giant slobbering as it hauled itself closer. Barely moving a muscle, not making a sound, he desperately whispered a prayer under his breath. But as he did so he noticed to his horror that something was wrong. One of the pockets on his jacket was _glowing_.

It was bright blue, visible right through the thick fabric, the same colour Tuuri always said his eyes went when he had his ‘funny spells’. Frantically he scrabbled at his pocket, trying to work out what was going on. With fumbling fingers he reached in and pulled out that damn piece of paper from before. He had completely forgotten he’d left it in his pocket. The glow was from the stranger’s symbol, light spewing from it along with a quiet, almost electrical hum. Lalli’s eyes widened in panic as he realised he could hide all he liked but the giant would have to be blind to miss that, shining across the plaza like a beacon. Maybe this thing had even _called_ the giant to him! He made to crumple it up and throw it away as hard as he could but there was movement in his peripheral vision and he was forced to freeze.

Through the air above him a head dove down, dripping ichor and gibbering to itself. Vertebrae flexed and creaked as it skimmed over the shattered marble of his hiding place and came to rest directly in front of him. A fist of ice seemed to squeeze Lalli’s heart as he gazed straight into its cracked and cataract-encrusted eyes, illuminated by the glow from his hands. The head turned this way and that, birdlike. Deformed nostrils sniffed the air. The giant stared right at him and…

…it did nothing at all.

For a moment Lalli imagined he must be dreaming, that any second now he would wake up in the tank (or, if the gods were truly merciful, in Keuruu) and all this would be gone. But slowly he realised that, for whatever mad reason, be it divine intervention or dumb luck or something else, the giant _couldn’t see him_.

The head was joined by another, and then a third. They scanned the little nook he was cringing in, hissing and gurgling to each other. Slowly, deliberately, they cocked lumpen ears to the ground and tasted the air with horrible tongues. One extruded itself further forwards than the rest, questing forwards, hunting. It stopped inches in front of his face. It was so close he could see the individual pustules on its scabbed skin lit up by the symbol’s cold light, smell the foetid reek of its breath. For a short eternity it glared straight at him – straight _through_ him – before uttering a quiet growl and retreating back.

One by one the heads withdrew and with a wet dragging noise the giant lumbered off in search of new prey. Slowly the laboured sounds of its movement faded and were replaced with the pristine silence of the night.

Lalli remained, frozen in his hiding spot, not daring to believe his luck. Still clutched in his hand, the symbol’s light slowly dimmed. The quiet hum died down and it became what it had always been, dead ink on recycled paper.

Slowly, very deliberately, he put the paper back in his pocket. Within seconds he was sprinting back towards their camp as fast as he could.

 

* * *

 

_Many hours later  
_

Onni had been looking forward to meeting Lalli in the dreamworld – any news about his sister and cousin, even bad, would be welcome after almost a week of silence. But he certainly hadn’t been ready for this.

He squinted at the symbol Lalli had sketched in the air between them. Yes, he recognised this all right. Lalli was the _last_ person he’d expected to draw one.

“This… it’s a _galdrastafur_. A rune. The Icelanders use them for their magic.”

Lalli, sat cross-legged on a rock that jutted out of the water, gave him a look that said _go on_.

“I think I recognise this one. Remember those Norwegian mages who came to Keuruu a few years ago? Hmm… you probably don’t. Anyway, they showed me some of the runes they use. They called this one Odin’s rune. You draw it in times of great peril, and it hides you from your enemies. Very hard to pull off, but very powerful.” Onni’s expression turned serious. “Lalli, where on _earth_ did you find this?”

Lalli leaned back and tried to process what Onni had just told him. _In times of great peril_ … He recalled the expression on the stranger’s face as Sigrun had yelled at him and he had drawn that rune almost without thinking about it. Sounded about right.

He laughed quietly – an unusual noise for him to make, Onni thought for a second that his cousin had sneezed – and smiled.

“It’s a long story…” he started.


End file.
